Sans titre, 1994

The different elements in this work retrace a project produced by Tadashi Kawamata in 1994 for the exhibition Transfert organized at the Centre de Création Contemporaine (CCC) in Tours and at the Atelier Calder in Saché, following the artist’s six-month residency at the Atelier in 1993. Three successive and complementary stages formed the exhibition: the CCC, where Kawamata showed several works prepared in France, the Atelier Calder where he had produced an installation, and lastly the journey between these two places. The visitor’s area of movement was included in the work, and the separation between the exhibition space and the place of creation was done away with. At the CCC, Kawamata was involved in turning the function of the art centre inside out. By erecting an “empty box” inside the place, he got visitors to stroll around this volume, granting them access to the reserves where crates used to transport works were stored. Some of the open crates gave glimpses of the projects which Kawamata had produced in France (Blois, Albi, Marseille, Grenoble…). This experimentation with space was carried on with the bus journey taking visitors from the CCC to the Atelier, through stages marked by “bus shelters” made of wood and slate. In the studio space, the artist’s workplace, people found the “empty box” from the CCC again. At the studio exit, a footbridge guided visitors towards the place of the residency. The tangle of planks mixed with nature and perfectly integrated the proportions of the constructions, the dimensions and the materials, creating a symbiosis with the place, an osmosis between the existing spaces and the spaces prepared by the artist.